In 2000, Forrester Research anointed Sapient the top e-business consultancy. Then the dot-com mania collapsed. "So we were number one in a defunct category," recalls Alan Herrick, president and CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Sapient. The firm then set about re-inventing itself in a second act. Last year, Sapient posted a 29 percent increase in annual revenue, and today, more than half of its 5,000 people are based in India. This year, Herrick is aiming for 30 percent revenue growth or more, but "the first two or three years [after the dot-com collapse] were brutal," he notes. Although the dot-coms were gone, Sapient believed there would remain a strong interactive component to business and the firm could capitalize on it.
Today, Herrick is driven by a sense of urgency. "We have this tremendous opportunity. Nobody looks like us, not the large Indian players, not the giant U.S. players. We have to exploit that opportunity now," he says.
Herrick credits the firm's client success model, the subject of a case study at the Yale School of Management, as central to its ability to thrive. The model revolves around metrics that measure client success and tie compensation to those metrics. The firm also embraces the fixed-price model. "We really have to pay attention to profit to do this," he says. He expects the client model to drive the entire consulting industry by 2012.
With two young boys at home, Herrick protects his weekend time, spending it engaged in sports with his boys. To further protect his weekend time, he spreads the India responsibilities across the management team. With a 28-hour flight door to door, he tries to arrange it so no executive, himself included, goes more than twice a year.
The staff and clients at Sapient will frequently hear Herrick use terms like "momentum," "synchronization" and even "cadence." They understand what he is talking about in terms of working and pulling together for clients. What they may not realize is that their CEO's vocabulary came right out of his years rowing as part of an eight-man crew in college. "In crew you learn early about pacing, cadence, momentum and synchronization. When you get the cadence and synchronization right, you get the momentum. It can apply directly to business," he says.
Today, Herrick feels Sapient has the momentum.
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